Saturday, 6 February 2016

Global Village Plundered

This week I
had occasion to dust off the campervan and spend a couple of nights in parts of
rural England where ‘progress’ is moderated by the indigenous population’s
affinity to the old ways. Such places give the comforting impression that
people still have roots and that there remains some variety in the ‘global
village’ we all inhabit. One night was spent at a prosperous-looking farm where
the aged but sprightly lady in charge looked and sounded like a 1950s
caricature (but drove a state-of-the-art Land Cruiser). The next night I was on
a smallholding where the rooster woke us in the early hours. Charmingly rustic,
I thought, and a change from the screech of emergency sirens back home. The
smallholder, however, complained that it had woken him and that, since it was
probably a fox alert, he could not get back to sleep.

I ended up
in Lincolnshire, where the land is a larder and every village has a butcher’s
shop – sometimes two. Like a man drinking in the last-chance saloon, I stocked
up on locally produced delicacies such as stuffed chine, pork pies, haslet and award-winning
Lincolnshire sausages. The good thing about traditions is that some of them are
really rather good.

I got back to Manchester in time to
deal with the tax deadline. I transferred what I owed HMRC online, while
waiting for the plumber to turn up. He was an hour late. “Sorry,” he said “I
had to go to the post office to pay my tax.”

“You found a post office?” I said. He
did not look amused. I tried introducing the hot topic of the day, Google’s
agreement to pay a paltry sum of tax – more as a PR exercise than an
acknowledgement of liability – but my man had his head in the cistern and was
not really following the argument.

“I only just made it. They fine you
if you pay late,” was all he said.

Later I read
about the problems of social deprivation which are plaguing Seattle, the home
of Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon – notorious tax-avoiders all. The city, like
most others, does not have the resources to deal fully with homelessness, drug-addiction
and crime, yet its public penury could be remedied by a contribution from the
massive wealth of its corporations. Do corporations think that they exist in a
separate universe? Henry Ford had at least the sense to see that paying his
employees a decent wage enabled them to have sufficient disposable income with
which to buy his cars. His motive may have been more selfish than philanthropic
but it was certainly a practical approach to the new economics of
industrialisation. I hear that Walmart has decided to do something similar and
that there is even a tech company in California which is experimenting with paying
all its employees the same rate. But these are examples of exceptional
corporate policy. We cannot rely on corporations to do the right thing:
“corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned;
they therefore do as they like.”*

And if what they like is to avoid paying tax,
they are well placed. Having transformed
themselves into global entities they can effectively ignore national tax
jurisdictions. The global village works fine for them: it’s one big market-place
with no tax-gathering authority in attendance. While lunching on poached egg
and haslet, however, I thought of a possible solution to this conundrum:
authorise the United Nations to collect taxes. Recalcitrant payers could be
threatened with its peacekeeping force although, on reflection, the mechanisms
for collecting and allocating the monies raised would probably swallow up most
of the revenue. And there would remain local issues: we wouldn’t want the
plumber facing international sanctions for not getting to the post office on
time.

*Edward
Thurlow, 1st Baron Thurlow: was Lord Chancellor from 1778 to 1783
and again from 1783 to 1792.